T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

The old man looked confused. He stared up at us out of pale, swollen eyes, then produced a handkerchief and blew his nose carefully, tenderly, as if he were aware that each blow might be his last. “Two?” he said, his voice distant and cracked, and then held out a trembling pink hand to take the twenty Petra offered him. As he fumbled for change in the cigar box at his elbow and then carefully tore two pale orange stubs from a wheel of all-purpose tickets, I couldn’t help thinking, with shame and mortification and an odd sensation of arousal, of the makeshift desk at the suck palace and the ten sordid despairing minutes I’d given up there. I took the ticket guiltily — ADMIT ONE — and followed Petra, my guide and support, into the roped-off area that enclosed the sickly tree, the gaping dark entrance to the bar and the smoking pit.

For the first few minutes I kept my head down, tense and wary, concentrating on bits of broken glass in the dirt, on the sharp, minatory toes of cowboy boots, on bare ankles, painted toenails and snub-nosed sneakers. Petra led me to the beer booth, where I studied the footprints in the beer-muddied earth and the way the froth dissolved at the bartender’s feet. “What’ll it be, honey?” the bartender asked, twanging the verb until it fell somewhere between bee and bay.

“Two beers,” I said, addressing his belt buckle.

Petra laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “My voice is changing.”

I stole a glance at the guffawing bartender, expecting Lloyd Sapers or George Pete Turner, and was relieved to find myself staring into the grinning, wild-eyed, gold-toothed, sun-blasted face of a drunken stranger in a Stetson hat. “Good beer, boy,” he said, handing me two plastic cups filled to the rim. “Drink up. We got a bottomless keg here.”

I nodded, wrenched my face into a simulated grin and gave the crowd a quick scan (the backs and profiles of strangers, naked shoulders, sunburned beer bellies, bola ties and blue jeans), and then ducked my head again, expecting the blade to fall at any moment. Then Petra said, “There’s Sarah,” and nudged me in the direction of a maze of tables heaped with food.

Sarah was tall, broad-shouldered and bosomy, dressed in Dan-skin top and jeans, her hair teased straight out from her head until it looked like one of those furry hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace. She sat at a long table behind a sign advertising her health-food store — THE SEEDS OF LIFE — and served falafel, tahini, tofu salad and carrot juice as alternatives to the ceremonial slabs of bloody beef that made National Heifer Week the event that it was. She wasn’t doing much business. I took her hand as Petra introduced us, then watched as she scribbled “Out to Lunch” over the store logo and laid a sheet of plastic wrap over the tofu salad. “Everybody’s over here,” she said, and we followed her past the smoking barbecue pit (out of the corner of my eye I saw billowing smoke, vague menacing figures, the glow of hot coals) to a blanket spread out in the shade of the building.

The three occupants of the blanket — Teddy (a little guy in racing leathers whom I took to be Sarah’s beau), Alice (a health-food nut, thin as a refugee), and a big, box-headed character with a wire-thin Little Richard mustache — smiled benevolently at us as we eased down amidst a clutter of paper plates and plastic cups, denuded ribs, puddled grease and pinto beans. I sat between Petra and Sarah, and sucked the foam from my beer. Flies hovered, the big P.A. speakers crackled, smoke spun off into the sky.

Petra introduced me — everyone seemed to be familiar with our connection, and this pleased me — and then Little Richard said that he’d just got back from three weeks in Hawaii, tuning pianos. This led to two distinct but rapidly converging threads of conversation: the Islands and the trade of piano tuning. Sarah said she was tone deaf. Teddy said that he once swam with humpback whales off Maui. Alice looked up from a plate of shredded carrots and said that she preferred Debussy’s Etudes to anything Chopin ever did — especially when she was in Hawaii. Did the tropical air make tuning more difficult? Petra wondered. Richard tied up the loose ends neatly with an anecdote about sun bathing in Kaanapali with his tuning forks, and then turned to me and said, “So what do you do, fella?”

These were dangerous conversational waters, and I could see the shoals and reefs prickling about me. Earlier, in the car, Petra had asked the same question and I’d begged off by saying, “You know — a little of this and a little of that.” “Sounds like a pretty evasive answer,” she’d retorted, and I’d dropped the corners of my mouth and said, “You’re right. Actually I run guns to Libya.” Now I opted for the straightforward approach. I looked Richard in the eye and told him I inspected airplane fuselages for stress fractures.

“Oh,” he said, and then the conversation rushed on past me, expanding to touch on methods of tofu preparation, the heat, the shameless behavior of a number of people I didn’t know, and the political situation in Central America. I leaned back on the blanket, scanning the crowd for trouble, smiling amenably at Petra’s friends and whispering nonstop witticisms in her ear. And oh, yes: drinking beer. It seemed that every time I took a swallow or two someone would hand me a fresh cup. This had a two-fold effect — of relaxing my guard (so what if I ran across Sapers or one of the other yokels — they had nothing on me) and suppressing my appetite. When Petra got us a plate of potato salad and chili beans, I did a couple of finger exercises with my plastic fork and then drained another beer.

After a while the conversation went dead, the C&W band lurched into some rural funk, and Sarah and Teddy got up to dance. Little Richard was passed out at the edge of the blanket, the sun filtering through the leaves to illuminate each separate astonishing whisker of his mustache, and Alice excused herself to go tend Sarah’s health-food stand. I thought of asking Petra to dance, but since I hate dancing, I decided against it. Instead I told her that I hadn’t meant to be flippant or to hide anything when she’d asked me what I did for a living, and sketched in what I’d been doing for the past year or so — that is, refurbishing Victorians in a slow market and reading banal, subliterate freshman papers as a part-timer at Cabrillo Community College. I didn’t mention the summer camp.

She looked disappointed. Or skeptical. “So you live in San Francisco?”

I nodded. “But I’m up here for the summer with a couple of friends — just to get away, you know?” “I know. Fishing, right?”

We smiled at each other. “Yeah, well, we do actually go fishing sometimes. But mainly the idea is just to rough it, you know, get out of the city, listen to the crickets, hike in the mountains.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her, and then she dropped her head to trace a pattern in the blanket. I felt then that she saw right through me, knew as well as Vogelsang what I was doing in Willits. Lies beget other lies, I thought — now’s the time to come clean, to start the relationship off right. But I didn’t come clean. I couldn’t. I was about to say more, to get myself in deeper, when she lifted her glass and said “Cheers.”

For the next hour or so, while the sun made a molten puddle of the parking lot and the band hammered away at their guitars as if the instruments had somehow offended them, we talked, getting to know each other, comparing notes. I learned about Petra’s childhood in Evanston, summers spent sailing on the Great Lakes, her talent for design and the first misshapen piece she’d ever fired (a noseless bust of Janis Joplin). Her father was an architect, her mother was dead. Auto accident. She had a sister named Helen. She liked green chartreuse, Husky dogs and old-time Chicago Blues. She was twenty-nine. When she was in the tenth grade, attending a private school, she’d met a guy two years her senior, an athlete, high achiever and verbal whiz. They dated. He was class president, she was secretary of the Art Club. He went to the University of Iowa, she went to the University of Iowa. They dated strenuously, lived together, got married. He went to law school, she worked (in a Kentucky-style-chicken franchise where they went through thirty gallons of lard a day). When he graduated and got a job with a firm in San Francisco, they moved to a skylit apartment on Dolores Street and she began doing ceramics in earnest. One night he told her he was bored. Bored? she said. I don’t want to talk about it, he said. Two days later he was gone. She called the law firm. He hadn’t been in for over a week. Later she heard that he was in Amsterdam, living on a barge, then someone saw him at a jazz club in Oslo. With a Danish girl. After that, she stopped asking.